Why Stock Visibility is essential for effective Inventory Management

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Effective inventory management is difficult to master and even tougher to perfect. Even with the help of the best technology, managing a warehouse full of stock is a challenging task. It’s even more difficult when you’re selling on multiple channels. Orders must be dispatched quickly, and customers need to be kept happy.

On the ground, that means a lot of stock movement – most of which will be single orders. In order to keep track of all this stock, you need a good inventory management system. And to identify potential problems – and quickly resolve them – your inventory management needs to have clear stock visibility.

Before you get started

With ChannelGrabber – as with any inventory management – for stock management to function correctly, you’ll need to make sure that all your products have been imported and have matching SKUs.

If you don’t know what a stock keeping unit (SKU) is, or you haven’t set them up yet, take a look at our guide to help you get started.

You’ll need to do this for stock visibility to be effective.

Viewing a single product

One of the most important views you’ll want to see is the status of a single product. You’ll want to check that the product is active on all relevant channels, and that the stock level is synchronised and correct for each.

By viewing the status of individual products, you’ll be able to quickly identify any potential errors – for example, where an item is currently not listed on Amazon when it should be.

This is especially useful if you’ve just added a batch of new listings to your channels, and want to check that each product is displayed correctly and generating revenue.

You could go into each of your marketplace and webstore accounts, find all your product listings and trawl through them to check a new product has been added correctly. Or you could simply view that status of your new products and quickly identify if a channel is not listed when it should be.

Getting an overview of all your stock

Another essential view in inventory management is total stock.

This is the best way to get a complete overview of all your total stock, so you can quickly and easily see the big picture, spot any products that are running low, and update all stock levels accordingly.

It helps you to keep on top of all your re-ordering, keep stock levels accurate and reduce the risk of overselling. If you make a sale offline – on the phone perhaps or in a physical shop – viewing total stock allows you to quickly amend stock levels and adjust availability across multiple channels automatically.

Identifying available stock

Viewing available stock is a useful option if you want to just see which products have stock that is currently unsold. It helps you filter out the stock which has been purchased and is earmarked for dispatch, so you get a real time view of current availability.

This view also lets you check that your available stock is synced across all channels at the same quantity, so you can display the same amount of stock on every marketplace and maximise the sales potential.

And if you see low stock levels on certain products, you can identify and address these to prevent customers from being disappointed.

Checking stock that’s not been dispatched

Finally, the ability to view un-dispatched stock is another essential function in your inventory management system.

Not only does this give you a quick indication of how much stock you have in the warehouse that’s waiting to be sent out for delivery, it also lets you keep an accurate record of how much stock you have in total, how much is available for sale, and when you need to re-order.

It’s another useful tool in helping you avoid any stock discrepancies – preventing both over-ordering and overselling.

For full support on stock management and different views, take a look at ourdedicated guides.

And if you haven’t yet discovered how much a good inventory management system can help you keep track of stock levels, then sign up for free with ChannelGrabber: